A Modern Satire

You will get complete written instructions in class, but the basic project is a contemporary satire in the style and spirit of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal."  The part that concerns you as homework is that you will need to do some research on your subject to make sure that you can present some factual information about the underlying situation correctly, and that you have a clear idea of specific strategies/solutions that have already been proposed or tried. 

No, I do not expect all of this research to be completed tonight, but you DO need to do enough checking around/seeing what's available to know if you can fairly easily gather the information you need to do a good job.  The intention is not to get involved in lengthy research, but to find essential material quickly.  You will frame an argument based on your overall knowledge of the subject, and then use research to plug in the details you need. 

This is the reverse of a responsible investivative research of course--in this case, the style of the satire is the teaching goal.  Nevertheless, your starting point must be a real-world situation grounded in the actual facts we face, and you will need to include--but "reject" a range of other ideas.  These ideas must include some that have really been proposed or tried. 

So tonight you should do enough to see if the available information is more suitable for one of your topic ideas rather than another.  Also, even though the solution you suggest as your "modest proposal" will be over the top, there should be a convincing point  to what you are saying.  Be sure that you understand how this works in Swift's essay--that was Question 1 in the For Homework section of yesterday's hand-out.  We did not talk about that today, but we will start there tomorrow.

Remember that this project is either by yourself or as a pair--no three's on this one.